More on: longing

Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

Stanley Spencer, 1924–27 Cascading white roses! Their throne arbored shade’s —-“curious scent” Spencer recalled while painting. Those Seven Sisters perfume ——-my heart. God the Father’s broad: solid ————–as a Giotto Madonna, his curve-plane’s not ours. His hand’s in his son’s hair. Christ, free, in his white gown, cradles three babies, one naked, in folds of…

Some small bone in your foot is longing for heaven                           —Robert Bly This twinge at first stir too modest for throb, more diffident than tug, not an itch, not the most incurious twitch of a hook, not a jerk, but the tease…

Like prayer __________I come from eternity Why did I have to leave? Above all _________why do I have to go back? It’s really nice here in the countryside An incoherent sentence in this discourse that _________________ goes on without end Blurred parenthesis ________________ between all and nothing Tablet without salvation __________________     faithful reverse whirlwind…

I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know. I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your every look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as this body…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…

Weightless as a float into the drift of water, one whose sin is forgiven. The Far Country a memory of fists and sour apples. Of that old, heavy plunge through snowfall, frozen, refrozen. The tug of gravity, slow and silent. Of no words forming on dry lips, of breath aching to a full inhale and…

I’d like to scale the cord in the vibrating dark, to find the source of all sound, to translate the frequencies. The way, as a child, I could hang onto a knot of rope and kick myself back from a wall into the arc and blur of summer air—that’s the prayer I want. To open…